The robot was originally created for rescue work, but military uses have also been suggested by engineers.

A number of experts have issued warnings about robots and artificial intelligence over recent months.

Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, earlier this month said that machines could take over from humans within a few centuries.

He also said he believes that alien intelligence, if it does exist, could be “electronic” and far better suited to space exploration than humans will ever be.

The future of intelligence is in making our patterns better, our heuristics stronger. In his article for Medium, Kevin Ashton refers to this as “selective attention” – focusing on what really matters so that poor selections are removed before they ever hit the conscious brain. While some – like Gary Marcus of The New Yorker or Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books, may be skeptical of Kurzweil’s Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, they also have to grudgingly admit that Kurzweil is a genius. And, if all goes according to plan, Kurzweil really will be able to create a mind that goes beyond just recognizing a lot of words.

One thing is clear – being able to recognize patterns is what gave humans their evolutionary edge over animals. How we refine, shape and improve our pattern recognition is the key to how much longer we’ll have the evolutionary edge over machines.

More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation.

Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military drones have malfunctioned in myriad ways, plummeting from the sky because of mechanical breakdowns, human error, bad weather and other reasons, according to more than 50,000 pages of accident investigation reports and other records obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act.

Crashes around the world

Commercial drone flights are set to become a widespread reality in the United States, starting next year, under a 2012 law passed by Congress. Drone flights by law enforcement agencies and the military, which already occur on a limited basis, are projected to surge.

Being from a family of innovators, Guy Cramer has designed up to 8000 camouflage patterns for over 50 states. His quantum-stealth invisibility cloak disguises the soldier from human as well as from thermal and infrared spectrum. Light is being bend all the time with fibre-optic cables, though he is doing it differently.